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Business Insider

Ruth Handler, the brains behind Barbie, had an idea in the 1950s. She wanted to show girls they could be anything they wanted to be.
The American businesswoman saw this opportunity as a gap in the toy market at the time and decided to launch a doll for girls that wasn’t a baby, but a woman – with a woman’s body, a job, and later, a boyfriend.

After being warned it was a bad idea and that no one would buy it, Barbie was a huge hit. Mattel, Handler’s toy company, went on to make billions of dollars off the doll. In the 1970s, Barbie became a symbol that feminists hated for creating unrealistic ideas about bodies, upholding gender stereotypes and whitewashing ideas about beauty.

But she kept selling and remains the most popular doll in the world. In July, the highly-anticipated Barbie film, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie as the titular character, will be released.
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It all began in the 1950s with a woman named Ruth Handler

In the 1950s, Ruth Handler, part-owner of a toy company called Mattel, noticed her daughter preferred to play with adult paper dolls instead of her plastic baby dolls. She saw a gap in the market.
She realised that “little girls just want to be bigger girls”. But during a trip to Switzerland in 1956, she had an idea for how to replace it when she discovered a German sex toy called Bild Lilli.

She was for adults and was sold in bars and sex shops but Handler didn’t care where Bild Lilli came from. She was inspired so she bought three of the dolls, then hunted for a Japanese manufacturer to create a similar product for the US market.
She decided her doll would have less dramatic curves and lose the heavy make-up and exaggerated lips but she had to convince Mattel’s designers, who argued the intricate clothing and plastic figure would be too expensive, as well as her husband Elliot, who simply doubted anyone would buy it.
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Handler’s husband said to her: “No mother is ever going to buy her daughter a doll with breasts.” But she had a vision. She said she wanted to create a doll that would let young girls dream about their own future, rather than having to dream about their baby’s future.
Referring to the idea of a young girl playing with Barbie, she said, “If she was going to do role-playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful breasts.”
The first Barbie debuted in 1959

In 1959, the first Barbie debuted at the American Toy Fair in New York. She was young, had blonde hair and worked as a fashion model. But wholesalers, primarily men, weren’t keen on stocking Barbie. At least half of them wanted nothing to do with the product, although she did get a few orders. One buyer told her, “Ruth, little girls want baby dolls. They want to pretend to be mommies.”

So Handler turned to a branding expert and psychologist named Ernest Dichter, who analysed why people bought things. He interviewed 45 mothers and 191 girls. He found mothers hated Barbie and girls loved it. His advice was, along with enlarging the breasts, to promise mothers Barbie would show their daughters how to become a “poised little lady”.
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Handler took his advice straight to TV. She advertised Barbie on Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club in an ad where the dolls looked like real models, symbolising what girls could grow up to be.


Later that summer, after the ad had aired, Barbie became a hit. Mattel couldn’t fulfil demand. In the first year alone, it sold 350,000 Barbies.
As Barbie’s popularity grew, Mattel released new dolls, new clothes and a range of haircuts, including one modelled after first lady Jacqueline Kennedy after former President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

According to Paul Mullins, an anthropology professor at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, the first five years were actually some of Barbie’s most progressive years. Instead of housework, she was independent, working as a nurse, an American Airlines stewardess or a ballerina.
Introducing Ken in 1961

In 1961, Mattel released the Ken doll after fans begged for Barbie to have a boyfriend. Handler made sure Ken was never the husband and only the boyfriend. His role was to be a sidekick. Even so, during the 1960s, Ken became more dominant. He got a number of different careers including surfer and football player while Barbie became more domestic.
Notably, in 1965, Slumber Party Barbie came with a diet book that only had one instruction: “Don’t eat”. But Barbie led the way at times, too. In 1965, Barbie the Astronaut was released – four years before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and by 1968, Mattel had made US$500 million in Barbie sales.
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The tide began to change in 1968 when 400 women picketed the beauty pageant Miss America. They were protesting how the pageant perpetuated an obsession with looks and Barbie got pulled into the fight.
A clash with the feminists in the 1970s

According to The Conversation, Barbie had everything and this unattainable perfection was damaging to young girls. During a women’s strike in New York in 1970, marchers chanted, “I am not a Barbie doll!”
Later, in a documentary called Tiny Shoulders, feminist and activist Gloria Steinem noted, “She was everything we didn’t want to be.”

If she was a real woman, her proportions would translate to 39-21-33. Some researchers found that a real-life Barbie would be so unbalanced she couldn’t stand, while another researcher calculated it was possible for a woman to have the same figure as Barbie, but the chances were less than one in 100,000.

In response to a complaint in The New York Times in 1963 about Ken’s “department store dummy” look, a spokesperson for Mattel said that the dolls had never been designed for education or to be scale models.
Barbie sales fell for the first time in 1972

At the time, Mattel released the first Barbie – the 1971 Malibu Barbie – that stared outward rather than gazed down, meaning she went from being an object to a subject and soon, Barbie was appearing in more serious roles. She was a pilot, a surgeon or a CEO. But other Barbies still came with mini domestic machinery, like washing machines and dryers.
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Even without Handel at the helm, Mattel tried to diversify. In 1980, the company released the first Black Barbie. Her tagline was “She’s Black! She’s beautiful! She’s dynamite!”

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, sales held while criticisms about Barbie and her impact on girls rose and fell. In 1989 alone, 22 million Barbies were sold globally. By the 1990s, Barbie dolls appeared to be everywhere.
They had been on the market long enough to become collectors’ pieces. There were also limited-edition releases. By 2009, more than a billion Barbies had been sold worldwide and nine out of 10 American girls owned a Barbie.
But market saturation brought its own issues. Barbies weren’t the only option any more.
Competition and more diverse Barbies

Barbie had to compete against new dolls like Bratz or Disney Princess dolls. This showed in Mattel’s sales, which dropped by 20 per cent between 2012 and 2014.
In response, Mattel launched more diverse Barbies and in 2016, it launched a range of Barbies with different body sizes, called “tall”, “petite” and “curvy”. It’s worth noting the curvy Barbie is still fairly slim, coming in at about a size four.
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It also launched Barbies based on real people like film director Ava DuVernay, volleyball player Hui Ruoqi and boxing champion Nicola Adams.

Barbies now come in 35 different skin tones with 94 hairstyles. There are gender-neutral Barbies, sign language Barbies and Barbies that use a wheelchair.
Mattel’s top-selling Barbie in 2019 was Black and had a short afro

The diversification has appeared to work. In 2021, Mattel sold 86 million dolls from the Barbie family, which equates to 164 dolls being bought every minute. In gross revenue, that’s US$1.6 billion. For comparison, up until 2009, Barbie had made US$3 billion off Barbie sales altogether, according to Forbes.
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In 2016, Kim Culmone, Barbie’s vice-president of design, told The Telegraph, “When you say ‘Barbie’ to someone, a very clear image of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, slim doll comes to mind. In a few years, this will no longer be the case.”
This article originally appeared on Insider.
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Ruth Handler was not taken seriously when she came up with the idea of Barbie in the 1950s, inspired by a German sex toy – but sales took off after she aired an ad on Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club
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